Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of May 21

Steel Orca: Green Data Center Atop Old Steel Mill - The site of an old steel plant site across the river from Trenton, New Jersey might seem an odd location for a “green” data center. But not to Steel Orca, a Pennsylvania company that is developing a large data center that plans to tap the Delaware River for its cooling system and power its servers using electricity generated from landfills and solar panels.

Apple Adding Data Center in Silicon Valley: Apple is expanding its Internet infrastructure with a new data center in Silicon Valley, as it prepares to bring additional server and storage capacity online later this year. The new server space, housed in a third-party facility, will be smaller than the huge iDataCenter that Apple has built in North Carolina.

New Software Drives Facebook’s Expansion - The Facebook data center team ran some large-scale simulations, and used a new software tool to automate the deployment of new server capacity at its new data center in Prineville, Oregon, which forced Facebook to create a third region within its data center infrastructure.

Wal-Mart is Mystery Prospect in Colorado Springs - Retail giant Wal-Mart is the company contemplating a data center project in Colorado Springs, the company said Friday. Economic development officials in Colorado Springs had previously said an unnamed Fortune 100 company was considering Colorado Springs as the site of a $100 million dollar data center project.

Scenes from Uptime Symposium 2011 - The Uptime Institute Symposium 2011 was held last week at the Convention Center in Santa Clara, Calif. Here are scenes from the conference.